California Focus: Another enviro-scare campaign

Is water vapor is a "pollutant"? Yes, according to the California Climate Action Team Report. Prepared in support of pending state "global warming" legislation, it recommends 45 emission-reduction measures intended to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions toward 1990 levels by 2020.

Amazingly, the report fails to tell us the predicted reduction in future temperatures if 1990-level emissions are achieved. So we have done that analysis here. If California were to achieve the carbon-dioxide reductions, the predicted decline in world temperatures in the year 2100 would be thirteen one-thousandths of a degree Celsius. If the entire U.S. were to achieve those reductions, the decline would be sixteen one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. The figure for the 34 most-developed economies would be one-third of one degree Celsius. If we add China, the figure is forty-five one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Such changes are far too small to matter.

The global-warming horror stories in the CCAT report - flooding, fires, heat waves, drought, insects - truly are biblical, but its proposals never would be approved for such tiny effects. Moreover, the CCAT free-lunch claim that the regulations would impose no economic costs is preposterous. The real question is: What does the science actually tell us?

A paper published in the journal Science last summer showed that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass, while the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (three times as large) is gainingmass. Another paper published in Science last fall reported that the ongoing trend for the Greenland ice sheet is an increase of 5.4 centimeter per year, almost all of which is at elevations above 5000 feet. Other research yields different findings because there is great uncertainty about new measurement techniques. But there is no dispute that Greenland was warmer in the 1930s than it is today and was much warmer 1,000 years ago.

Hurricane activity (frequency and wind speeds) has increased over the past decade, but a substantial body of scientific literature shows that this phenomenon is related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation - water-temperature changes that shift about every decade - around Greenland and the tropical Atlantic. The AMO warmed around 1995. Hurricane activity has increased, and Greenland glaciers below 5,000 feet have been depositing more ice into the ocean. There is little need to invoke SUVs and the other purported sins of mankind to explain this.

There were no small glaciers 5,000 years ago in what would become the Western United States. Surface temperatures 3,000 years ago were about 2 degrees Celsius higher than today, abnormally low 1,500 years ago, and over 1 degree Celsius warmer in places 1,000 years ago. The Earth then entered the so-called Little Ice Age during about 1850-1900. Satellite measurements show an increase in lower tropospheric temperatures of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade from 1979 through this March, or 1.3 degrees if extrapolated for 100 years.

So much for Gov. Schwarzenegger's argument that "The debate is over." No one disputes that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations will create some warming, but the magnitude is disputed, well, hotly. Will the warming be observed everywhere, or mainly in Siberia in the winter? (Likely answer: the latter.)

More fundamentally, there can be no "consensus" about future emissions because they will be determined largely by world economic growth conditions. There has never been a consensus among economists about economic forecasts even for the United States only five years in the future; is there a forecasting consensus about worldwide economic growth 50, 60, 80 years from now? Please.

The CCAT report fundamentally is a political document far less concerned with environmental quality than enhancing the political power of the Left to subsidize its constituencies. Recall the myriad other environmental scare campaigns. The pesticide Alar. Global cooling. The northern spotted owl. Power lines and childhood cancer. The population bomb and worldwide famine by the 1980s. The worldwide depletion of most natural resources by the year 2000. And so on. It is time to just say no.

Contact the writer: Adjunct Fellow in the Adjunct California Global Warming project at the Pacific Research Institute

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